Further Study into the World of SEO
You might remember my little SEO experiment a while back involving 3 identical web pages but with differently formatted title and meta description tags? If not you can read the details HERE. Anyway, I thought it was time I had a little look at the results to see how the pages fared with the three major Search Engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo).
As expected, the Googlebot was the first to crawl the experimental pages and the first SE to index them. Google has also followed 'the rules' in that the page with the 'correct' format comes out on top. This is all good stuff, especially given that Google remains head and shoulders above the competition and therefore the most 'important' search engine for site owners and SEO specialists. So it would appear that following 'the rules' when formatting Web pages will pay off with Google.
However, not all of the SEs follow the same principles with their algorithms...
MSN has yet to index any of the pages, even though the msnbot has crawled the links several times. Perhaps the MSN algo requires more than one inbound link for a page to be considered important enough to index? Or perhaps a single web page with only one link to it is regarded as irrelevant?
Yahoo, on the other hand, has indexed the page with the nonsense title and irrelevant meta description. Quite why is a mystery to me as it seems to make no sense whatsoever. Perhaps with the different title and description the page is viewed as having more content than its competitors? Or maybe the title and description are simply ignored? Either way I don't like the idea that sloppy and badly formed pages can rank higher in the Yahoo SERPS.
In conclusion, it would seem that my little experiment has raised more questions than it answers, especially with regard to MSN and Yahoo. Although it is comforting to see that the world's most popular search engine appears to be playing by the rules. This reinforces the popular opinion that creating good quality content is the best long term strategy in getting a site to rank highly. One thing I have learned for sure from this little experiment is that I will have to make further study into the world of SEO.
Watch this space...
As expected, the Googlebot was the first to crawl the experimental pages and the first SE to index them. Google has also followed 'the rules' in that the page with the 'correct' format comes out on top. This is all good stuff, especially given that Google remains head and shoulders above the competition and therefore the most 'important' search engine for site owners and SEO specialists. So it would appear that following 'the rules' when formatting Web pages will pay off with Google.
However, not all of the SEs follow the same principles with their algorithms...
MSN has yet to index any of the pages, even though the msnbot has crawled the links several times. Perhaps the MSN algo requires more than one inbound link for a page to be considered important enough to index? Or perhaps a single web page with only one link to it is regarded as irrelevant?
Yahoo, on the other hand, has indexed the page with the nonsense title and irrelevant meta description. Quite why is a mystery to me as it seems to make no sense whatsoever. Perhaps with the different title and description the page is viewed as having more content than its competitors? Or maybe the title and description are simply ignored? Either way I don't like the idea that sloppy and badly formed pages can rank higher in the Yahoo SERPS.
In conclusion, it would seem that my little experiment has raised more questions than it answers, especially with regard to MSN and Yahoo. Although it is comforting to see that the world's most popular search engine appears to be playing by the rules. This reinforces the popular opinion that creating good quality content is the best long term strategy in getting a site to rank highly. One thing I have learned for sure from this little experiment is that I will have to make further study into the world of SEO.
Watch this space...
posted by Tony at
10:51 AM
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